Jefferson in His Time

Americans seem to have forgotten American Mind (1960), Merrill Peterson nothing about Thomas Jefferson, showed that American culture has always except that he was once a living, used Jefferson as "a sensitive reflector. . . of breathing human being. Through- America's troubled search for the image of it- out our history, Jefferson has served as a sym- self." The symbolizing, the image-mongering, bol of what we as a people are, someone in- and the identifying of Jefferson with America vented, manipulated, turned into something has not changed a bit since Peterson's book we like or dislike within ourselves-whether was published, even though the level of pro- it is populism or elitism, agrarianism or rac- fessional historical scholarship has never been ism, atheism or liberalism. We continually ask higher. If anything the association of Jefferson ourselves whether Jefferson still survives, or with America has become more complete. what still lives in his thought, and we quote During the past three turbulent decades many him on nearly every side of every major ques- people, including some historians, have con- tion in our history. No figure in our past has cluded that something is seriously wrong embodied so much of our heritage and so with America and, therefore, that something many of our hopes. has to be wrong with Jefferson.